


Past+Future

by JustAnotherWriter (N1ghtshade)



Series: Advent Calendar Gift Fics [20]
Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, and James being a bad one, jack being a good dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-23 20:13:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17086982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/N1ghtshade/pseuds/JustAnotherWriter
Summary: “I just wish I remembered her.” Mac sniffs. “He remembers her. He gets to, and I don’t, and that’s not fair.”“Your mom?” Jack asks quietly. He doesn’t want to push.“Yeah.” Mac holds up the picture. “I thought I remembered what she looked like. But really, I just remember this picture.”The air feels like it’s been punched out of Jack's lungs.Ellen Jackson.In which Jack isn't just Mac's practically adoptive parent, he's his real one as well...





	Past+Future

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nevcolleil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/gifts).



Jack never really knew  _ how _ Mac’s mother died. He doesn’t pry, it’s not his place to. He knows it’s a sore point for Mac. There aren’t even any pictures of her in the house. Jack knows the kid doesn’t like to be reminded of his past.

And then James comes back, and brings with him all the pain the kid’s been trying to push away. Jack doesn’t like the way the man acts like he’s supposed to be allowed back into Mac’s life without so much as an apology for what he put the kid through for the past eighteen years. Jack doesn’t like to push too far into Mac’s life; but he doesn’t like what the man is putting the kid through. 

_ He’s the most miserable excuse for a father I’ve ever seen. _ Jack might not be a parent to anyone, not by blood, but he has learned from the mistakes he saw Elwood make, and on the other hand he had his Pops to show him how it ought to be done. 

So when he shows up to the kid’s house, in the evening, hoping for a cold beer and one of their random conversations, and the kid is freaking  _ crying, _ Jack has had enough.

“Mac?” he asks, sitting down next to the kid and putting a hand on his shoulder. Mac’s got a picture on his lap and he’s staring into the fire. 

“I just wish I remembered her.” Mac sniffs. “He remembers her. He gets to, and I don’t, and that’s not fair.”

“Your mom?” Jack asks quietly. He doesn’t want to push.

“Yeah.” Mac holds up the picture. “I thought I remembered what she looked like. But really, I just remember this picture.”

Jack takes the photo. A woman with long blond hair pulled up in a ponytail, leaning on a car door, laughing. 

He stops.

The air feels like it’s been punched out of his lungs.  _ Ellen Jackson. _

Ellen Jackson was an agent for some dark ops division. She and Jack met on a whirlwind op in Kosovo. It got messy, and crazy, and they both thought they were going to die. Hooking up in a hotel room that night had been a sort of celebration of surviving one day and an acknowledgement that they weren't likely to make it through the next one. And then when they did...Jack had tried to make it work. He really had. But being from two separate agencies, never knowing when you were going to stand someone up on a date because of an op…

He broke it off with her in October of ‘89. He never saw her again.

“Jack?” He suddenly realizes Mac is staring at him. “Jack, what’s wrong?” 

“I…”Jack’s mind is suddenly spinning.  _ I was with her in ‘89. Mac was born in March of 1990.  _ He can’t...that’s impossible...they hadn’t seen each other that much that year, running ops. Maybe it was someone else, somewhere else…

He chokes on the words. “When did they marry?”

Mac stares at him. “February of ‘90. Right before I was born. Dad said they had to alter the wedding dress the week before the ceremony.” He glances at Jack. “I guess I wasn’t really expected.” Jack’s heart twists even more. 

_ It had to be a whirlwind thing. Unless she’d known him for years. Unless he really was Mac’s father... _ He doesn’t know what to think. He has to ask. He has to know. Until he does, he won’t tell the kid anything. “Well, at least you were a good surprise.” 

It takes all his willpower to stay and act as normal as possible and cheer the kid up. All he wants to do is drive to wherever James is living now and ask him point blank the truth about him and Ellen and Mac. 

He thought Mac’s mom was probably some normal suburban housewife. But suddenly it all makes sense. James picked someone he thought could keep up with him. Someone who he didn’t have to lie to. She probably was killed on a mission and whatever Mac thinks about her death was a cover-up. 

He steals James’s number from Mac’s phone when the kid falls asleep. He’s not technically allowed to have that number, but that’s okay. He needs the truth. Even if it gets him fired. 

He calls James at five thirty in the morning. The man sounds both groggy and angry, asking Jack repeatedly how he got the number. Jack just tells him to meet him at a corner diner, and hangs up. 

He figures the man will come, if only to tell Jack to his face that he’s fired. He’s on his second cup of coffee when James walks in the door and joins him. 

“What’s this about, Dalton?” The man’s voice is clipped. 

“It’s about your son. If he even is.” Jack sees the man’s mask slip a little. “He showed me a picture last night. Of Ellen. She and I dated. The year before he was born.”

James’s shoulders slump, there’s a sudden exhaustion in his face. Some kind of relief. “I wondered if you would find out.”

“That he’s my son?” Jack came here thinking it might be true. Now that it is he can’t believe it. 

“She married me because we had been friends for years; I was in love with her, and she wanted her child to have a father. Her family approved; I seemed like the safer option. My cover was a respected scientist. I think they preferred that to tile salesman.” 

“She knew Mac was my son?”

“Yes.” James sighs. “She decided not to tell you; thought it would make everything harder. You had re-upped with the Army by that point. She didn’t want you to regret leaving her.”

Suddenly everything about James’s treatment of Mac makes sense.  _ Mac wasn’t really his son. He didn’t really care at all.  _ All James saw was someone else’s child he’d been saddled with.  _ He pushed Mac and pushed him so he would become as much like James as possible. So he didn’t have to see a child who was someone else’s son. _ Jack feels a horrible weight of guilt resting on him.  _ James treated Mac the way he did because of ME. That was all my fault. I abandoned him and Ellen, and they paid for it. _

“How did she die?” Jack asks, chokingly. 

“Car bomb in Shanghai. Angus thinks it was a car accident.” James sighs. 

Jack leans on the table, hands clenched around a coffee cup. “And you didn’t tell me. About any of it.”

“I was in shock. Ellen left a letter, said to contact you, but I just couldn’t.” James says quietly. “I lost track of you, after a while.”

“Lost track of me?” Jack asks. “You run a freaking covert agency. You could have found me if you wanted to.” 

“I suppose I could have. I just...Angus didn’t need any more upheaval in his life right then.”

“You know what he needed? He needed a father who actually cared.” Jack growls.  _ I would have come home. I would have quit the army, gone back to the ranch, raised him down there with the family. They love him now, they would have loved him then. _ His heart aches at the thought of a seven or eight year old Mac sitting next to him in the farm truck, the kid grinning proudly after roping his first calf, Mac walking across the auditorium in the little high school in town. 

“I felt guilty, after I left. When he joined EOD I pulled strings, got him placed with you as his Overwatch. By then the lies had gone on so long they felt easier than the truth.” James glances at Jack. “Are you going to tell him?”

Jack honestly doesn’t know. Does the kid need to know that he missed out on having Jack in his life for all those years? That Jack’s no better than James, for skipping out on Ellen the way he did? Jack wants to cry thinking about it. Does he dare inflict that pain on Mac?

But Mac is living a lie, making nice and making up with a man who doesn’t deserve to have that boy in his life. Not that Jack deserves him either, but Jack will try. 

The drive to Mac’s house is a blur. So is the conversation. By the end of it, the only real things in the world are the picture frame lying on the bench beside them and the crying kid clutched in Jack’s arms. 

They have a long way to go before any of this begins to heal. Jack isn’t going to do what James did. He won’t force Mac to even talk to him before he’s ready. Mac can be angry or brokenhearted or clingy, or whatever he wants to be, because maybe Jack hasn’t been the father he should have been all those years ago, but he sure as hell will be now. 

They can’t go back, they can’t fix the past. But they can start again. 


End file.
